Pining Doesn't Come From a Pin
by Cellar Door 26
Summary: She would laugh at her blind optimism later, her neck craned in an odd position as she stared down at the brilliant blue eyes that were closed. SarahJohn, SarahWalt, then SarahJohn, again. One shot


**Title:** Pining doesn't come from a pin; It does prick though.  
**Disclaimer:** No infringement intended, The Dead Zone doesn't belong to me. It'd be mighty cool if I did though.  
**Summary:** She would laugh at her blind optimism later, her neck craned in an odd position as she stared down at the brilliant blue eyes that were closed.  
**Spoilers:** Mostly AU, as I've just started watching the show, and don't know much canon. But it follows what little I know of the show.  
**Note:** My first attempt at this fandom, I think it's one of the best things I've ever written. But it could just be my old DSN obsession coupled with the fact taht my name's SaRAh.

------8-------

Mary Mary, quite contrary,  
how does your garden grow?  
With silver bells and cockell shells  
and pretty maids all in a row.  
-old nursery rhyme

Sarah grew up thinking she was a normal girl. At five she had an imaginary friend named Tim, who liked to make mud pies and flip over in a swing. Sara constantly talked for hours and hours, overjoyed that she finally knew someone (even if she had to make him up) who could always laugh at just the right place, or look sad enough to cry when the story warranted it. But when Sarah was seven her parents told her she was grown up enough to stop 'imagining' Tim and begin first grade.

Sarah didn't like this idea very much.

Still, Sarah though the idea of growing up novel, and so she said goodbye to Tim and wished him good luck on his next child. Dragons like that sort of talk.

After being stuffed in a dress and hair brushed with a _bow _in it, Sarah was led on the arm of her mother to Ms. Miller, and after what seemed like hours of grown-up talk, Sarah was finally led to a group of kids. With the candor that only the innocence of childhood brings, Sarah situated herself in front of a group of children and began to tell a story. At first they listened intently as children do, because her story had pirates in it, but they didn't laugh at the right parts, and didn't have tears glistening in their eyes when she had a main character cross the plank. In fact, that's when they laughed. And when her anger made her lash out at Laura, the girl who laughed in actual _delight _at John's death, the teacher put her on the naughty school.

During these ten minutes of doom, Sarah decided two things. One, she was never again going to wear a dress so poofy that she couldn't adequately punch a girl, and Second, she was never going to tell a story to anyone ever again.

Like any child though, Sara forgot all about this decree, and wore the exact same dress to her cousin's wedding, and while eating chatted up a boy who paid even less attention to her stories and more attention to the cake on her plate.

Sarah wished on the drive home that she still had Tim.

Sarah started thinking she was odd when she was fifteen years old and still flat chested. The boys pointedly ignored her, especially Mark Drescher, her resident heartthrob. Every night Sarah lay on the bathroom tile, a can of whole corn (because it was heavier than creamed) in each hand, as she pushed the cans upward and back down, a mantra flowing continually under her breath ('Just imagine the red dress, won't it be nice to actually have something to fill it out?'). She stopped when Mark gave Laura his letterman jacket at the homecoming dance literally five minutes after feeling up her new corn supplied flesh. The next morning her mother woke her up, demanding to know why there was two perfectly good cans of unopened corn was in the garbage. Sara told her it was because life wasn't golden like corn (give her some credit for what little wit she had left, three and a half hours of sleep does not much make one clever). And left it at that.

Sarah thought herself a mutant when she was sixteen years old and still hadn't had a pimple. But it was a passing thought and quickly disappeared when Mark told her she had beautiful skin.

After three years of pinning, Mark asked Sarah out. It was romantic too. During an assembly, after being accepted Senior Class President, he called up Sarah, Senior Class Vice President. With microphone in hand, he asked her if she would please do him the honor of escorting her to the movies on Friday. She said no. And wished it was out of spite.

It was then that Sarah realized she was contrary.

Not the normal amount. Where someone is tired in the morning and puts their shirt on backwards, but honest-to-goodness odd. Feels things out of sequence and by the time gets it al worked out the situation is changed and whatever you worked out doesn't matter.

So when Sarah finally worked out she wanted to be a teacher, she was two hours away from graduation. But with some fast legwork, and a Very Important Document That Would Change The Rest of Her Life, her major was changed and she graduated with a teacher's licence. When her best friend Laura (Her roommate freshman year, she has never even known a male named Mark) asked her how it could all be so simple, how she ended up having the right amount of credits, Sarah foolishly answered that everything worked out, if it was big enough.

She would laugh at her blind optimism later, her neck craned in an odd position as she stared down at the brilliant blue eyes that were now and what seemed like forever, closed.

The first time she saw those brilliant blue orbs so full of excitement and exquisite joy her own eyes mirrored hate and despair. Lost in a sea of peeling cream colored walls, arms full of what used to be a color coded system of paperwork and was now just a mess, Sarah completely missed the man standing in front of her. After their first encounter though, Sarah promised herself it wouldn't happen again.

"Woah." An expulsion of air that formed speech as Sarah- quite literally- knocked the wind out of the man. Although she might not have noticed the incident if this guy hadn't grabbed onto her arms to stabilize himself. Sarah looked up, noticing as her cheeks colored, that his skin felt too comfortable touching hers.

"Oh, sorry. Are you-?" Concern weighing out more heavily with the handsome stranger than the weight of her papers, a stream of colors soon decorated the floor as she lifted her hand to his chest as if to examine it. Seeing the mess, Sarah let a stream of curse words fall beside it. Bending down to grab the treacherous papers, somehow more angry that she had to fall out of the strangers grasp to accomplish this, Sarah was sure that the man had left.

Too bad the rhyme didn't go Contrary Sarah.

"-New here? Naw. I've worked in this school for a few years. I'm John Smith, real name, and yes my parents really were that uncreative. I'm the resident Science teacher in this wing and I'm about to have lunch. Care to join me?" At the time Sarah thought Johnny always talked like that, and it had nothing to do with the most beautiful girl he's ever seen walk right into his arms. So she just grabbed the papers he'd bent down to pick up and was about to politely turn him down. Even though she was currently looking for the teacher lounge and it solved her having to eat alone. But Sarah had just gotten out of a bad relationship and really didn't want to spend a lunch with a guy who picked up the newest teacher. An apology on her lips, she took one look into his eyes and committed a sin.

"When I was six I had an imaginary dragon named Tim. You have his eyes." Not her name, not an apology, not a thank you or even a yes please or no thank you to his invitation, Sara had just told a virtual stranger that he reminded her of her best friend at the age of five to seven to happened to be imaginary. Suddenly the idea of cracking her head open on a locker by her clumsiness and dying seemed like a remarkably intelligent thing to do.

"What did you say your name was?" A hint of a smile played out in John's voice.

"Sarah."

"Beautiful name, did you know Sarah means princess in Hebrew?"

"No." Where was this conversation going? He gently turned her, grabbing her elbow as he strode her along the corridors, slowly moving her in his direction.

"Well isn't it interesting then that at the tender age of six you already knew a princess needed a dragon?" Her laughter surprised them both, and Sarah, without thought, spoke.

"Would that make you my honorable prince charming then?" Contrary Sarah didn't say these things, and she wondered why this all felt so normal, this conversation.

"Oh, I'm far from honorable."

After the car accident Sarah thought- well no, she didn't want to think. To eat, to teach, brush her hair or make sure her socks matched. She wanted to be by Johnny's side, to see the moment his brilliant blue eyes flashed so that she could make a joke and he'd laugh at just the right moment, his eyes crinkling at the exact millisecond they should, so he could hold her and she could make him promise to never do this to her again.

But life was cruel, and it made you move on. For her it took a pregnancy. And she began to eat for the baby. Slept for the baby. Worked so the baby could have the beautiful crib with hand painted bears that Walt insisted would give even him nightmares. Oh Walt. She resisted him. But she was so weak. Grief filled her, worry filled her, a sickness of the heart that dug deep, that insisted take precedence. And after John Jr. ('why are you missing this Johnny?') was born, Sara broke. She told herself she wasn't strong enough to raise a baby on her own. That Johnny would want his son to have a father like he never did, and in a twisted way, in a _contrary _way, Sara decided for Johnny she would love Walt.

Not telling J.J. about his father identity wasn't on purpose. This painful topic was never brought up in the house, Sarah insisted upon it. It was only when she realized that J.J. thought Walt his father that she changed her mind. One night she sat J.J. down and tried to tell him about Johnny. _The heroic man that made her feel so beautiful and funny and like a Great storyteller. _Walt walked through the door right when she got down with their first meeting, tears swimming in her eyes, her body contorted so she wouldn't shake, that Walt sent J.J. to his room. _'We'll wait awhile longer,'_ Walt said, holding her hand tight. She smiled at him and convinced herself that Walt was talking about J.J. She didn't put off telling J.J. because she was frightened of just how bad she would get again after finally truly thinking about _him_. She wanted to make sure he was old enough to truly understand how great his biological father was.

In the end, contrary as ever, Sarah didn't have to make the decision to tell J.J. about Johnny, about the man in the coma. Because he woke up.

How can the best sentence you could ever think to hear also be the worst?

Why is it when she heard that Johnny was awake, and asking for her ('oh my Gd, I wasn't there!') she hid in a closet and mapped out her life from meeting Johnny to the precise minute she was hyperventilating in a closet? And why, for just one full minute did she come the closest she could to hating her son for making her marry a man that could take care of them?

She was human, that's why.

She didn't remember much about after Johnny woke up, or when she found out he had psychic visions, but she did have an intense worry that he would touch her skin and know exactly how she felt. How she lived without him. That awful minute when she blamed their son and felt so guilty afterwards their boy got a stomachache from all the sweets she kept on giving him.

Bits and pieces built her contrary life as she remained married to the man she loved just enough as they raised the son that was blood-tied to Johnny, the man she loved more than _just_ but was too honorable (the honorable knight to his princess) to just ask her, beg her to break her vows and be with him. Marry him.

Now that she thinks about it. She's actually kind of glad he didn't do that, because she would have run off with him before the sentence was fully out of his mouth. And she felt like an awful enough person as it was.

This didn't stop her from imagining it though.

So when Walt died, Sarah was in shock. Honest-to-goodness shock that coursed through her veins and prevented her from crying. After awhile she stopped trying to cry, to show everyone that she was in mourning, even if it didn't look like it, because she did love Walter. She couldn't have this baby inside of her if it wasn't true.

Pregnant and heartbroken seemed to be a running theme.

It was as if the two most important men in her life (beside J.J.) had switched places and now she was confused. Maybe that was why she pushed John away when he was just trying to be helpful, to fill her heartache. But she felt like she did when she was with J.J. and needed to prove to herself that she could do this alone. She could get it right the second time.

But again she was weak. The feelings stirred, and the prevention between them was gone. Why was she trying to fill it? The blow-up to Johnny made her feel worse than morning sickness could ever bring her, and so when Johnny set down the spare key, she offered the olive branch.

"I hate this house."

It was odd being pregnant with one man's baby and living in another's. But she'd done this before, and was quickly learning that everything was easier the second time around.

She just hoped her contrary life would get a bit more normal.

Was there any other reason she named her daughter Hope?

End.


End file.
